Why were there no accidents, or at least none of which he was aware? The answer was a sudden amber glow inside his skull. It is because the whole precarious mechanism is holy, the whirling spindle of the cosmos recreating itself volcanically each instant. Was what kept it cohesive the radiant threads of spirit he sensed everywhere here, spun out of thousands of years of the people’s ritual practice and self-abnegation and their devotion to the countless avatars of Brahman, the ever-fluid, transformative faces of God? He saw two of these faces now, pasted to the dashboard near the bus driver’s right hand: Ganesha with his massive grey elephant’s head and benign smile beneath his dangling trunk, and Hanuman, the warrior monkey god who flaunted his superhero physique shamelessly. They were both insuperable and potent purveyors of good fortune, portrayed in the primary colours he associated with carnivals. He recognized they were not symbols, but powerful beings whose gaze he could not hold for long, even in their two-dimensional decal form. They affirmed what he had already sensed: that what redeemed India’s extraordinary welter of beauty from its peoples’ unbearable suffering, instant by instant, was the omnipresence of the animals.
He had a vision of returning to North America; the streets of Toronto look naked and wrong to him, and he aches to register again that pulse of exuberantly sacred life where he has only to glance up to see them: the innocent four-footed, including the cattle and the camels, the delicate drifts of goats and the families of monkeys, holding one another tightly, keeping their own secret counsel, even within the heart of the cities.
Once his bus was past Agra, the traffic thinned, although the honking, kaleidoscopic “Blow Horn!” vans still zipped regularly back and forth across his line of vision. On the Fatehpur Sikri Road, his eye was caught by a woman in an orange sari banded in royal blue. She was talking on a cell phone she held in one hand, while in the other she clutched the lead of a black water buffalo that followed behind.
All his life to come he will be grateful to this woman who has chosen to wear this particularly arresting colour, and to be walking just where she is, as his bus passes. Otherwise he might never have noticed, just after he lost sight of her, the nondescript building set back from the road. It was a stripped-down, functional assemblage of squared blocks that appeared to be made of concrete. The sole concession to design was these blocks’ alternating shades of buff and rust. He regretted this charmlessness because the building’s name, which he jotted down immediately in his notebook, reverberated in him with a thundering, yet ultimately felicitous shock. He had no doubt he was the recipient of one of those rare gifts chance sometimes offers the unlucky. Had he turned his head, or blinked, he might have missed it. Now he had safely captured this serendipity in his book, whose black covers he clutched tightly between his palms. Writing down these four words had made him as joyful as he had been for some time. He sat straighter and felt his will as one with the speeding bus headed toward holy Pushkar. For the first time in many days, he could conceive of a future life illumined by purpose where he might redeem his woeful part in his friends’ deaths.
As the bus approached the desert of Thar, on whose edge Pushkar clung, Pinto saw more and more camels. Some were solitary. Some followed behind handsome men with jewel-coloured turbans and extravagant moustaches. Up close, he saw the camels’ teeth were fearsome, which gave their huge, lugubrious faces a sinister aspect. Only now did he fully grasp the ripe irony of Campbell’s nickname. He revisited his shame that he had so often envied his friend’s flawless good looks, a jealousy so sour he was sure he must have stunk of it. His gorge rose as he saw again that delicate head, still encased in its helmet, sliced from the slim body that shuddered upon the fallen bike, as if in disbelieving grief at this most unnatural severing.
By the time his bus pulled into Pushkar, sweat streamed from Pinto’s brow. He kept wiping his eyes, trying to dispel the neurotic notion that the moist clinging air had nothing to do with monsoon season, but was rather the touch of his dead friends’ clamouring ghosts.
The white walls of his room in the simple guesthouse offered some solacing calm, as did the blue-green Indian cotton bedspread with its floating, feathery print. The print reminded him of a pretty tunic that Agnes once wore. He remembered how delicate and exotic she had looked in it, and wished she were here with him; that they could pour cooling water over each other’s hands in the terra-cotta basin the landlord had replenished mere moments ago. He imagined her lying down beside him on the blue-green spread, and how they would keep quiet company together.
When he woke several hours later he saw that there was still enough daylight left for him to visit the temple. He did not want to go at night, lest he miss anything. His landlord, a lean, striking man with thickly waving silver hair, was visibly pleased when Pinto asked for directions to the Temple of Lord Brahma.
“So good, so good. A young man from America” — Pinto did not bother to correct him — “who wants to go first to the temple. Who does not want drugs. So many.” He shook his head. “In the cafés just for them, in the streets.” The man mimed the smoking of a joint, pursing his lips, then expelling all the air from his lungs. “Some are lost,” he continued, “cracked, they smoke so much.” He raised his index finger to his forehead and made a vicious screwing motion. “Cracked.”
Pinto shivered, his mind sliding helplessly to Zeke upon the slab in the Arles morgue, not a bone left unshattered. Cracked through and through.
“It is good you wish the temple,” his landlord said. “I will take you myself. I will show you the Temple of Lord Brahma — the only temple to this god in India. His image in the temple is very old.” He paused, studied his fingers as if for numerical confirmation. “Two thousand. No, more. Two thousand and five hundred years.
“Come, let me take you. It will be an honour. My name is Mr. Mohindra. And you, is it Peter? Shall we go together to the temple?”
Pinto nodded appreciatively. He felt light-headed. Twenty-five hundred years was a dizzying extent of time to contemplate. As he followed his host through the pungent streets, with their pyramids of spices, lavish flower garlands, and everywhere the smell of fried pastries and ripening fruit, it occurred to him how little sustenance he has had over the past few days, only bananas, biscuits and soda water. At that moment, the sun hit him so hard, he staggered. He reached out blindly, and braced himself against the sleek flank of a passing cow. He was steadied as well by its gaze, as the great head swung around to take in who he was. He was not so sun-struck as to imagine the animal looked at him any way but blankly. It was enough that the cow’s regard was guileless and creaturely.
The face of the god, on the other hand, simultaneously awed and chilled him. In fact, the Lord Brahma had four faces, staring out in each of the cardinal directions. But it was the foremost face that rooted Pinto to the spot, even amidst the press of worshippers around him, who left flowers, spoke prayers, chanted and swayed, and rung repeatedly the heavy silver bell that hung in the inner sanctum. A filigreed silver casement framed the god in his raised alcove, and his tiered crown was also made of beaten silver. His eyes were a startling white, like little eggs inset in his walnut-brown face. The starkness of the white suggested a wide surprise, like a cartoon character’s astonishment. Yet how else would the Lord Brahma look but astonished, as he beheld, wide-eyed, the world he had just created?
“Marble,” he heard an English woman’s voice behind him. “The idol’s made of marble.”
This bleak observation left Pinto irritated and perplexed. Marble was white — like the outer temple structure itself, or perhaps honey-coloured or pink. Wasn’t it? Could marble really be this dense brown hue verging on black, like an absorbent seed or root hidden long underground, just as Eli had said, gathering and concentrating telluric energies until its power was fearsome and incommensurable? And how on earth, he wondered, could anyone look at the god’s face and call it an idol, as if it were a mere doll or an empty husk? His feet were very cold on the black-and-white temple floor. He c
hafed his hands. He wished he had bought one of the opulent garlands to leave as an offering. There were luscious blossoms looped around the god’s neck, vivid reds and oranges that made Brahma’s face even more darkly inscrutable. The silver bell rang again. He felt Mr. Mohindra’s hand at his elbow and understood it was time they moved on. How long has he stood here?
He followed Mr. Mohindra down the steps and then clockwise around the base of the inner temple. This was part of the ritual all visiting pilgrims performed, Mr. Mohindra explained. He pointed out, as they passed by, the shadowy opening in the outer temple wall that held the image of Shiva, the destroyer. Of course, Pinto thought, destruction must always be just that close. He flinched from the invasive idea that Shiva’s fiery feet were as much capable of annihilating belief as everything material. In a bare instant, his apprehension of the carved god’s head as a thing of immense, ineffable power might degenerate into rancid doubt. What if the pragmatic Englishwoman was right and it was only an idol made of stone? But even to entertain such a question hit him straight away as barbarous. The intensity of the faith of the people who continued to flow into the temple was palpable. There was no place for doubt here.
As he and his guide came full circle to the base of the steps leading up to Lord Brahma in his filigreed casement, Pinto saw above and through the mass of murmuring, chanting worshippers, the towering pinnacle of the inner temple roof and its thick, round supporting columns. The roof was bright orange and the columns the aqua of certain cloudless summer skies. He was reminded of the bold palette of the trucks and vans’ “Blow Horn” signs. If he had a trumpet and could play it, he would go and do so now. Somewhere respectfully removed from the temple he would raise it to his lips and send out a mighty blast of joy. A tremendous Gabriel-like testament to what he felt surging inside him: the certainty that the entire cosmic mechanism was sacred. Not just the earth and waters and all creatures furred, feathered, finned and scaled, but humankind as well, as evidenced by the face of the god. At that instant a bright gleam penetrated the cave of gloom he had inhabited for weeks, if not months. Or was it years?
It struck him that for far too long he had been labouring under the cruel delusion he was cursed because of his disfigurement. How long has he believed this? He saw, as if rudely shaken from a self-induced torpor, how much of his life force he had dissipated in branding himself a man “of evil luck.” In a person of Gandhi’s stature, the epithet had a noble fittingness, a moral legitimacy. From his young manhood onward, the Mahatma had pitched himself into an epic battle against racism, colonialism, violence of all kinds and the searing injustice of the lot of the untouchables. Gandhi had been relentless, had used himself up, body, blood and bone in the struggle, while far lesser men sneered at him, as some did still, calling him a fake and a fool.
As for himself, what had he ever done except play at being good and gentle and kind, practising his beatific smile in front of mirrors real and imagined? While inwardly he had raged no less. Had he ever forgiven anyone for what he perceived as his curse? Certainly not his mother, nor any of his schoolmates who shunned and mocked him, nor Campbell for his boundless good fortune and for seducing Agnes.
I have been despicable, Pinto thought, as he and Mr. Mohindra retrieved their shoes from the shop near the temple. “One hundred rupees,” the shopkeeper said, as Pinto picked up his running shoes. He dug out the bill willingly, and was suddenly aware of a trio of middle-aged German women who sat perched on little stools, laughing at one another’s attempts to outline their eyes with kohl. They paid him no attention, other than a swift glance that took in his height.
On the way back to the hotel, Pinto was assailed by memories of Old Delhi he would shrink from if he could: like the street beggars with bowls balanced on the stumps where once their hands had been. What right had he to think himself cursed? He had all his limbs, his good health and strength. He was a cosseted North American, and rich compared to the families he had seen in India, their homes a stretch of pavement, their roofs a mere lip of tarpaulin held aloft by sticks. No door and no privacy of any kind. You could see their pots and their cooking implements strung on a frayed rope above their heads, and all their haphazard bedding that looked like a jumble of rags. Yet they seemed to bear their wretched circumstances with a consummate dignity. They did not put on a lying face as he did, painting the falsely benevolent smile over a self-pity rankling as a boil. His fakery had undermined his assertiveness and his judgement. He had allowed himself to be enticed by abstractions; to believe that by the study of ethics he would become virtuous; that by being part of a harum-scarum protest group, he would save the lives of animals.
Only now, with those four words he had copied into his notebook on Fatehpur Sikri Road, did he see clearly what he must do. And he must start by leaving behind the curse of his self-absorption, his adolescent obsession with what was, after all, only skin-deep.
At the hotel he gratefully consumed the bowl of dhal Mr. Mohindra produced, together with two airy roti. The charge was far less than the 100 rupees he’d paid the shopkeeper to guard his shoes. The hot food made him feel more solid. The spongy sensation in his legs and arms seemed finally to have gone. He considered taking a stroll through the streets of the town or perhaps venturing to the tent-studded desert on the outskirts. But the instinct was strong to retreat to the simple white room with the sea-green bed cover, to be alone and create a hallowed inner space for the day’s images: the face of the ancient god with the astounded eyes; the ceaseless flow of pilgrims giving thanks for the world’s creation; the silver bell repeatedly resounding.
Tomorrow, he resolved. Tomorrow he would walk through the town and look at the lake and then get on the bus to Ranakpur.
“Tomorrow,” Mr. Mohindra apparently plucked the word direct from his thoughts. “Tomorrow, if you wish, I can arrange for you to receive a blessing by the holy lake. I know a priest who can do this, and who will not cheat you.”
Pinto found this unexpected offer unsettling. He did not want to appear ungrateful, but the idea of a blessing agitated him. He groped for the cause of his anxiety. Did he suspect the blessing might be a charade for susceptible tourists? But he could not believe that Mr. Mohindra, who had been so helpful and generous with his time, would be party to a deceit. What then . . .? Was it rather that he felt undeserving of a blessing, whatever its form might be? I am far too corrupt. These were the words on the tip of his tongue, which he recognized right away as unseemly arrogance, another variation on the self-generated curse he had sworn to shed.
What he did say, and he could not help himself, was that he was “undeserving.” A confused dismay curdled Mr. Mohindra’s brow. Pinto observed in his host’s face ample proof of his own rudeness.
“It is not a thing to be deserved,” Mr. Mohindra said with deliberate patience. “It is a blessing not only for you, for your good karma, but for all of your family; for your friends also and all those you love.”
For all those you love. That settled it, then. Why might this blessing not be as much for the dead, as for the living?
“Thank you. I am sorry I hesitated. I . . .”
Mr. Mohindra’s long fingers performed a fluid combing gesture in the air.
“We shall go early,” he told Pinto, “before eight o’clock, before the ghats become crowded.”
He left the dining alcove before Pinto had time able to respond. He wondered about the word “ghat” which he associated with ritual cremations. When he consulted his guidebook, he discovered that it simply meant a flight of steps leading down to a river. He lay down and stared a long time at the whitewashed ceiling, half-hoping to see some comforting figure appear, an all-forgiving mother to assure him he has not been flagrantly discourteous, that he has not failed himself badly, once again.
In the morning it was not Mr. Mohindra, but his teenage son Pradeep, who came to the breakfast nook to escort him to the lake. Pradeep, wearing the white shirt and tie of his school uniform, was a shorter, plumper version o
f his father. His self-introduction, “My father sends his apologies,” smacked of an ironic mockery. He was very young, perhaps fourteen at most.
Pradeep walked quickly and Pinto occasionally lost sight of him behind an obtruding chai stand or a meandering water buffalo. It was so early that many of the shops were still shuttered. Pradeep took an abrupt left turn into what at first looked like merely a side street. Then, just a few steps farther on, Pinto found himself standing at the top of a flight of steps. Directly ahead of him was the lake, overhung with a pearly mist. It was as if a casement had swung open on another world where the insubstantial was made substance, but rarefied, having never been polluted by sin or shame. Everything he beheld was compounded of mist and white light. He knew this to be an illusion, just as he knew that the graceful edifices of white marble surrounding the lake were solidly three-dimensional. But he let himself be transported by their present ethereal aspect, and by the silver and blue-streaked mountains in the far distance, whose lineaments seemed to float above the lake.
What came then, on their own light feet, were the words of one of the few poems he had ever willingly taken to heart. A set piece on a prerequisite English survey course, it had been the clear and quiet pool amidst the twisted thickets of the “Metaphysicals.” He had been irked by the other poets of this school, who struck him as showy, with their overwrought similes and self-advertising cleverness. Henry Vaughan’s work, on the other hand, was both lucid and unquestionably sincere:
They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
Hunting Piero Page 30